Cautions about comparing the human mind to computer systems

For decades, it has been convenient for therapists and those operating in certain therapeutic modalities to use parallel ideas (analogies) when juxtaposing the concept of the “human mind” with computers and computing systems. Even one of those modalities uses the word “programming” in its name – NLP, Neurolinguistic Programming. And as a further example, many hypnotherapists over the years have used the unfortunate term, ‘reprogramming the subconscious’.

Ideas surrounding “junk in, junk out” – “information in, information out” equivalences have become ubiquitous in our society with people using the notion without much thought, as though it’s a proven theory. I still allude to the metaphor while discussing mind viruses on my Af-x site. The convenience is seductive, and more pointedly, in this case, safe.

In the earlier times of my own clinical affectology approaches to ‘explaining the difficult-to-explain’ I was guilty of overusing computer/brain/mind parallels in my language. I proposed that the early-life emotional learnings (encodings) were similar to little ‘programs’ that had been acquired before the learning of language and use of words, and that they formed a sort of deeper operating system that informed the way the rest of the mind-engine in its day to day function on mental and emotional levels.

Even in more recent times, I admit I was still using the metaphor in a different way, but nonetheless pointing my finger at computer systems to try to have people understand the working of the human affect unconscious – at a very deep level.

TRYING TO EXPLAIN “DEEPER” – DOS to the rescue

When others were talking about the GiGo metaphor (garbage in, garbage out), I had long ago realized that most, if not all, computer metaphors were vapid, focusing, as they were and do, on aspects of computer functioning that are relatively easy to access. So, since affectology engages with that area of human mind experience that is inaccessible to conscious functioning, there was and is no correlation between my work and the “usual” form of computer analogy use.

So, I embarked on a project to use the DOS (system) of computer code as my metaphor to describe affectology and Af-x. I said that Af-x was more like the DOS system that is mostly not able to be accessed by operating systems like Windows. This, of course, meant that we as humans use the operating system to function in a conscious way and occasionally – when we go to therapy or try to work our ‘deeper selves’ out – attempt to access our deeply functioning core emotional aspect (represented by the DOS system) when this cannot be done. It’s the wrong way around.

Admittedly, I was a little proud of this construct because I thought it did indeed point out the separation between conscious functioning (operating system) and the emotional core (DOS system), showing that no working at operating system can access the DOS. And that in order to access and reconfigure DOS required a completely different process, different path, a more unique skill-set in order to reach the goal – usually more highly skilled computer technicians.

I was partly right.

But, affectology and Af-x were always modes that were certain about, and championed the ‘bottom-up’ theory of human mind development that followed the notions of quantum psychology’s ‘strange attractor’ formulation, and the ‘it follows’ proposal that one learning is always informed by a previous one. So, I was always a little doubtful that “DOS” was describing the analogy quite well enough.

MACHINE CODE – Before it all

And then one day someone pointed out to me that what I was really trying to signify was “machine code” or “assembly language” which, is apparently closer to the mark and a far more ‘basic and primary’ construct that underlies all computer processing. I’m not that well versed in computer function, so I looked it up. This is what I learned …

Machine code or machine language is a set of instructions executed directly by a computer‘s central processing unit (CPU). Each instruction performs a very specific task, such as a load, a jump, or an ALU operation on a unit of data in a CPU register or memory. Every program directly executed by a CPU is made up of a series of such instructions.

Numerical machine code (i.e., not assembly code) may be regarded as the lowest-level representation of a compiled or assembledcomputer program or as a primitive and hardware-dependent programming language. While it is possible to write programs directly in numerical machine code, it is tedious and error prone to manage individual bits and calculate numerical addresses and constants manually. It is thus rarely done today, except for situations that require extreme optimization or debugging.

Almost all practical programs today are written in higher-level languages or assembly language and translated to executable machine code by utilities such as compilers, assemblers and linkers. Programs in interpreted languages[1] are not translated into machine code although their interpreter (which may be seen as an executor or processor) typically consists of directly executable machine code (generated from assembly or high level language source code). Machine code is pure hexadecimal binary (1’s and 0’s) code that can be executed directly by the cpu. If you were to open a “machine code” file in a text editor you would see garbage, including unprintable characters (no, not those unprintable characters ;).

Object code is a portion of machine code that hasn’t yet been linked into a complete program. It’s the machine code for one particular library or module that will make up the completed product. It may also contain placeholders or offsets not found in the machine code of a completed program that the linker will use to connect everything together.

Assembly code is plain-text and (somewhat) human read-able source code that has a mostly direct 1:1 analog with machine instructions. This is accomplished using mnemonics for the actual instructions/registers/other resources. Examples include things like JMP or MULT for the jump and multiplication instructions.

… My goodness!!

So, I’ve mostly abandoned the computer metaphor to explain my work, fundamentally because I am most uncomfortable with aligning something as complex, chaotic and flexibly organic as the human mind system, alongside what amounts to being a hard-edged machine and the ordered algorithms of the machine world. But it’s still seductive to resort to the ease of using that metaphor. Most people think they understand what I’m getting at. It seems an apt analogy for explaining a part of the human emotional ‘engine room’ that is impossible to access using any cognitive method.

I particularly like that Eddie Harmon-Jones Ph.D. on this blog wrote well, if not briefly on the subject. Here’s an excerpt:

Metaphors can help us to understand complex systems, because they give us a simplified way of conceiving how they work. However, metaphors can also mislead us and interfere with our understanding, precisely because they oversimplify. Like the carpenter whose only tool is a hammer and who thinks everything looks like a nail, the psychologist who subscribes to the computer metaphor tends to think every psychological process looks like a cognition. This myopic, overly cognitive viewpoint leads to absurdities in trying to squeeze human psychology into an information-processing model, such as defining emotions as “valenced* cognitions.”

*(psychology) Having an (often specified type of) emotional value

Recent social and affective neuroscience research shows that a computer is an inadequate and misleading metaphor for the brain, and this research is going to be the focus of my blog. Humans, along with other organisms with brains, differ from computers because they are driven by emotions and motivations. The brain is much too hot and wet to be represented by a computer. The brain is electrical, but it is also driven by fluids (blood) and chemicals (hormones and neurotransmitters). Most importantly, the brain is part of a body which it drives to action, and research from an embodiment perspective also shows that the whole body (not just the brain) affects emotion, motivation, and other psychological processes.

At the end of the day, though, we should never forget that computers are only machines. As much as it seems convenient to use the computer equivalence because we suspect that others will understand what we’re getting at, its use is still only one-dimensional. It can never allude to what amounts to the extreme complexity and multi-dimensionality of the human unconscious affect (emotional) synthesis that affective neuroscience has shown to be inaccessible through conscious processing – the path, by the way, that we are all prone to take. It’s the wrong path.

Beware of the simplicity of the computer analogy. Beware of thinking you can easily ‘know’ your deepest ‘assembly code’.

The Meaning of ‘Private’ in Therapy

Throughout the 30 year development of Af-x and ECR, the notion of what ‘privacy’ really means has been fraught with misunderstanding. I wish there was another word in the English language that could be used to indicate the specificity of what private in affectology means. One of my tasks could very well be to find another more precise word, or look to other languages and reinterpret back into English (Greek, perhaps). Watch this space.

Because of the long socio-professional installation as to what ‘private’ designates, we all tend to relate it to one thing, and one thing alone – the act of non-disclosure by a psychotherapist (or doctor or lawyer, etc) of the substance or topic of the matter that has led a client to that professional. This has led many a client of Af-x or clinical affectology to assume that they know exactly what we mean by ‘mind privacy.’

In affectology, what we are promoting is the notion that the part of the affect unconscious that our work is specific to, is unavailable even to your conscious mind. That is … ABSOLUTELY! We may call this phenomenon “auto-seclusive,” meaning hidden even from yourself. This is an understandable position. We have been conditioned in our culture to believe that everything about who and what we are, is definable and can be analyzed to some extent. The very strong contention of affectology – supported by the affective neuroscience – is that there are aspects of your unconscious emotional core that drive your adult characteristics and have a great deal of influence over who and how you are today.

Here’s a few lines from one of the Af-x program descriptions. The use of the term UPGs refers merely to our defining of the emotional core. In this case, the acronym refers to Unconscious Preverbal Governors.

I do not operate from UPGs, do I?

WHY THE QUESTION ARISES: Most people are not comfortable with the idea that “something” outside their awareness and ability to analyze is governing their lives. Adult ego can rarely accept that there are forces that cannot be controlled through an act of conscious will.

WHAT AFFECTOLOGY SHOWS: The territory of the affectology approach is exclusively the unconscious or subconscious. Unconscious Preverbal Governors (UPGs) operate beyond our ability to define or control. Present-life problems and issues would be easy to moderate and change if we were driven only by conscious reason and will. The likely cause of indefinable affect habits is the presence of UPGs.

So, are any of us really in charge of ourselves? We’d like to think so. Know thyself? Affectology contends that you can never do such a thing, fully. But also contends that it’s no big deal to change your emotional and behavioral PATTERNS without micro-analysis of the depths of your affect code. For a more robust look at why that may be the case, you can go here.

It’s common for intending clients of Af-x to say things like, “I want to get into my subconscious to find out why I do the things I do” or “I know how to go to my subconscious – I’ve done it before. I want to fix things about it.” Of course, these people have been conditioned by contemporary thought, to expect that the affect unconscious is analyzable, that they must actively bring about some modification to ‘what’s going on within’.

As much as I’d like to accommodate them, it remains true, and I have to make the statement, “can’t be done.”

I’d much rather talk about you in this blog, but I feel it might be useful to say a bit about where I came from and how I came to construct the ‘affectological view’ of human behavior, yours and mine and everybody’s. Admit it; I seem a little bit “off-standard.” That’s because I am, and I want to show you that there’s a very definitive path that got us ‘here’ and why it has inestimable value to the idea of emotional balance for everybody, and snips the hubris of current psychotherapy a bit.

I know it seems like a personal boast or some sort of litany of personal achievement on my part, but these are important ‘steps’ along my road toward what is now a proven and effective form of ‘guidance toward perfect self help’.

My first taste of ‘the mind’ came about when I was a teen, rising in the ranks of GoJu karate, where mind focus was an important attribute. This led me to studies into the philosophy of Bukkyo Zen and its practical mindfulness tradition. I had spent almost all of my childhood in silence, so the practice of a meditational mindfulness over three years was really a snap.

From this point on (in the 1960s) my steps toward what I am now and what I do were:

Study of Morita Therapy

Studies and practice in Zen Shiatsu

Studies and practice inAmpukuShiatsu (following the philosophy of emotional cache being found attandenarea of body)

The purpose of this post, though, is to draw your attention to the content of number 7 in the above list. It was this realization that launched my focus on the very principles that lie at the core of my work and all my philosophy of ‘the life of the mind.’ It was the reading of a few specific works by academic and clinician authors that created my own tipping point in the realization that there’s more going on within the mystery of the ‘mind chaos of everyone’ than we know about.

So, in case you’re interested in pursuing a similar path of interest and curiosity, here are some details of those works.

… just like that. No more, no less. Obvious! Think about it. So, extrapolating and summarizing his further comments,

and at six months of foetal development can understand its mother’s emotions. Prenatal neuroscientists show that even at a stage as early as 22 weeks (into gestation), the unborn child has the capacity – and uses it – to store information related to emotional (affect) experiences that it might be having, even in utero. The research proposes that at this stage in development, the limbic brain and its associated physiological links, through the central nervous system, have become fully formed, and it’s inconceivable that the complex neural system remains idle until we, as adult observers, “think” it should activate.

From Conception to Birth, by Tony Lipson. The late Dr Lipson (Dept of Genetics, The Children’s Hospital, Sydney) was a pioneer in the research into childhood maladaptions. This book is not widely-read, but there was one passage that struck me as vital. It was/is …

What are the facts? When does the spinal cord communicate with the processing and thinking part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, where the grey and white matter resides? It is only when the vital connection between the spinal cord processing centre, or the brain stem, and the brain itself is made at 22 – 23 weeks that feelings of the senses such as warmth, light, sound and pain have any real moral meaning and form part of experience. The spinal cord can then communicate with the true brain and vice versa, both responding to movement, feeling and position and presumably, albeit unconsciously, able to have memory which will influence the person for the rest of its life.”

I repeat, “… able to have memory which will influence the person for the rest of its life.” And there it lies. The formative notion that started my ball rolling in an effort to determine just ‘how’ those preverbal (maybe prenatal) experiences impacted who we are today!

Then came Daniel Goleman, who you’ll recognize for his book “Emotional Intelligence.” A few years prior to writing this socially (and professionally) ground-breaking book, Goleman wrote Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception. It is my opinion that this book is far more important to the world than Emotional Intelligence.

The opening paragraph to the Introduction says it all for me. Most students and followers of my work would “get” that what he is talking about and searching for, we, in our sphere of Af-x, have indeed found. This is that paragraph….

My topic is hard to explain to you, although it is something with which we are all intimately familiar. The difficulty is that we have no precise words for it. That very fact is, in part, why it intrigues me so; there are, it seems, vital parts of our lives which are, in a sense, missing – blanks in experience hidden by holes in vocabulary. That we do not experience them is a fact which we know only vaguely, if at all. Those blanks in experience are my topic.”

What Goleman describes as holes in vocabulary can also be likened to the good old “doughnut principle.” The most obvious thing about a doughnut (donut) is its hole; the part that’s not there. If you’re trying to solve a scientific mystery or an existential mystery relating to human behaviour, then you start out always missing some data, or it wouldn’t be a mystery and open to question. The principle is just that from the shape of the hole, you can often infer a lot about the shape of the doughnut.

Let’s say the hole, the vacuum, if you like, relates to the issue of preverbal and-or prenatal affect encoding a la Janov, Damasio, Lipson, Verny and many others. Let’s say the actual meat of the doughnut – the graspable part – relates to the way that a person receives their conditioning information that leads to the establishment of belief systems throughout the early and later parts of their life. That conditioning has been “informed” (influenced) by the ineffable aspects of the hole, but those affect encodings have been just that:- influences, influencers, pattern-forming information.

One cannot say that affective encoding builds a definable structure of behaviour as life unfolds, but introduces a kind of ‘fuzzy logic’ to the way the person relates to their deeper emotional selves.

And so it went. As I put together all the research into affective neuroscience and “back there on the periphery” was my older findings about the importance of silence and the way that emotions become clearer the less ‘chatter’, I carefully constructed the genesis of what is now known as Af-x, ECR and the equiMind program.

CAREFUL STEPS

I am nothing if not “careful” and cautious when it comes to the treatment of, and influence on, other people. I abhor the great cacophony of claims and “come-hithers” of many forms of so-called therapy. From my own early times, I have believed that all therapy is auto-therapy, all help is self-help. This has informed the nature of my efforts over the decades, and my striving to create an emotional (and mental) “assistance program” that not only echoes my belief that people actually make changes for themselves rather than ‘get them from a therapist’.

Further to this, I have striven to create a treatment program that leaves the client in no doubt at all that changes that occur are of their own doing rather than mine.

As early as the formative years of the PSH approach, I instituted a system by which we could PROVE that there was merit in our approach – that we were not joining the throng of acronym-ridden therapeutic approaches that did not seek to prove or disprove their claims of success.

This involved very specific style of garnering feedback about outcomes from ex-clients. People were contacted 3 to 4 months following their therapy, by an independent (external) organization. They were asked about the results of their treatment and assured that their therapist would NOT know directly of their comments. This ESR system (Efficacy Study Research) was independently administered and is still in operation today.

My point about ‘careful steps’, then, is that from the inception of the ‘subconscious privacy’ approaches (Af-x and ECR) we have been conscientious in our attention to what has been a system that has proven that the vast majority of our clients have experienced satisfying results from their engagement with Af-x or ECR practitioners. This system of research is and has always been mandatory for practitioners in this field.

The success of the Af-x/ECR approach is underpinned by the research and neuroscientific data that describes this ‘hidden self’ – the ‘backseat driver’ in our lives. The correlation, then, between these successes and the premise of the existence of the non-verbal primary affect nucleus existing deep in our inaccessible (attempting to use words) subconscious is unassailable. We can’t deny it. The black swan is alive and well, knocking on the door of the clumsy approaches to mainstream psychology today.

My own mission is to help expose the existence of the ‘emotional core’ of the human mind – how it behaves as a ‘silent passenger’ – a back-seat driver. And that although inaccessible through ‘talk therapy’, there are ways to make positive changes to the non-verbal patterning that your mind has established. What you read above are the steps that have got us here.

Hints? Maybe not “hints,” but statements. I think it’s only fair to state what my philosophies and professional ‘decrees’ are about and what they’ve been about for most of my career, if not most of my life.

As the image here implies, there’s a huge schism existing between what constitutes the real, authentic self and what is the deep emotional character of our minds and selves, and what psychology has garnered and fostered over more than a century. That schism, I have called here humorously, a Freudian Slip. And I mean that there’s a significant slip between what is authentic in our subconscious minds and what amounts to a cascade of interpretations, confabulations and out-and-out untruths that we tend to come up with in response to the “tell-me-about-it” injunction that occurs in the psychologist’s, psychiatrists or counselor’s chair.

I won’t go back to the ‘start’ – there’s another post that tells that tale … The Spark at the Beginning, but we’ll talk a little about the results of all that work and how it applies to the underlying principles of Af-x, ECR and affectology in general. So the ‘hints of things to come’ is not talking about a future that’s not here yet, but what’s to come in the contents of future posts.

The SKINNY on the Philosophy of Affectology

If you’ve spent any time reading other areas of this blog site or any site referring to Af-x, ECR or Clinical Affectology, it’s likely that you’ve already picked up on the fact that this work runs in an opposite direction to what our society thinks as being effective therapy, whether it’s labeled psychotherapy, psychology, counseling or in fact any of the other approaches that use TALK as their mainstay.

And by talk, I mean the use of words and cognitive constructs to either spill the beans on what the problem is (an interpretation of authenticity) or spill the beans on real or confabulated events and traumas (also an interpretation of authenticity) that are supposed to have been at the cause of any current problems or issues. So, in affectology and any of its practical applications, ‘talk’ extends to ‘any talk at all’.

Well, in the face of that, it’s to be expected that many people simply question, “if there’s no talk, and I’m not allowed to say anything, how can the practitioner know where to go with the therapy?” Good question? But that’s only a good question when you remain fixed within the mythology of “uncovering the secrets of your subconscious” that Dr Freud was so intent on establishing as ‘the answer to good therapy’ such a long time ago.

Decades of neuroscience research – and specifically ‘affective neuroscience‘ – has shown without any doubt that we human beings are generally blithely unaware of aspects of our deep emotional core and that these very important influential drivers of our emotions, behaviors and mental states can’t be accessed using ‘words’ and ‘thoughts’ – narrative and cognition.

For a detailed look at the cascade of unconscious dynamic that leads us from very early emotional learnings (neuro-acquisitions) through our life from infancy to now, there’s a good summary on this page of the general affectology site.

Freud got it right for his day. Or at least, he provided an important step for a professional look at this mysterious “subconscious.” But the science has moved much further in modern times. Like modern jetliners have slipped way past the Wright Brothers’ invention, and even the ubiquitous DC3, then smart therapy has slipped well away from Dr Freud‘s idea that ‘the subconscious had to be uncovered and analyzed in order for change to take place’.

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Two Minds

Neuroscience has shown that there exists a distinct separation of the human conscious and unconscious 'minds' to the mutual exclusion of each – wholly segregated with no possibility of interrelationship in the way that psychological analysis has always claimed as “method.”
Where people develop lives with symptoms and problems, gifts and abilities, we know that the emotional subconscious is a set of natural patterns that are inaccessible through conscious or cognitive analysis (using word constructs).